Participate, and add your thoughts to our blog posts and to the comments made by others. Vote on the value of each discussion to let others know what is interesting. Browse through all of our Points of View or choose a specific business issue from the list at the right.

Points of View

Change happens one person at a time Ghandi We agree with Ghandi. And, aggregating those individuals toward common and integrated goals is anything but easy. Enterprise level change is hard and complex. Shortcomings of Enterprise Change Management The success rate of implementing change to achieve business objectives is dismal. For years Professor [...]

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” Dr. Herb True1 “The After-Action Review (AAR)… was conceived back in 1981 to help Army leaders adapt quickly in dynamic, unpredictable situations they were sure to face2.” And, I cannot imagine a more important environment for learning than when you [...]

Everyone wants a new one; Few are successful “In a recent McKinsey poll, 84 percent of global executives acknowledged that innovation is extremely important to their growth strategies, yet a staggering 94 percent were unsatisfied with their own innovation performance.” From Competing Against Luck How do you best support innovation and change? What interdependencies within [...]

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence- only in constant improvement and constant change. Tom Peters How do you think about improvement in and around your company? There are countless choices for thinking about continuous improvement, from Deming’s quality movement to Hammer’s process reengineering to Toyota’s TPS. More recently, “lean” has entered the lexicon and combined [...]

If you are anything like me, historically your initial discussions with IT drifts toward their requirements and policies- some version of a C-I-”No”. This is usually followed by some type of business-sponsor intervention allowing us to technologically enable our business outcome, with at least a little lingering animosity. During a recent webinar1, Professor George Westerman [...]

Blue Ocean Growth is not strategy Strategy is based in competition, derived from Greek generals, and littered with the vocabulary of war. Our own definition of strategy, included within the strategic architecture of our strategy-paksm, builds off this combative thinking. And, while business strategy may share similar goals, tools and a development approach by the [...]

I have a client who is an avid outdoorsman. He often waxes poetically about his kayaking in the Rocky Mountain streams near his cabin- “as long as the water isn’t too high”- and mountain climbing in west Texas. Occasionally, he leaves right after work to get a jump on yet another weekend climbing adventure. His [...]

According to an article published by Barry Gill in the June 2013 edition of Harvard Business Review, we spend half our work-year on email. The statistics are based on Gill’s 2012 survey of 2,600 workers in the US, UK and South Africa who email everyday. Gill helps us understand where that time goes as he [...]

For years executives (and more than a few consultants) have applied judgment in assessing a business’s capability readiness based at least in part on one-on-one interviews. However, the need for a holistic understanding of core competences has been out of academia and in the real world for nearly 20 years. To what effect? Are [...]